It has long been predicted that audio/video (A/V) technology will converge with personal computing, mobile, and Internet technology. In fact, the convergence of A/V consumption with Internet technology is well underway. Therefore, there is an increasing awareness that the personal computer could become the main entertainment center in the home.
However, current technologies suffer from some difficulties that preclude them from realizing the full potential of this phenomenon. For instance, when a user typically searches the Internet for textual results, there are often textual summaries generated for these results. This allows a user to quickly gauge the relevance of the results. Even when there are no summaries, a user can quickly browse textual content to determine its relevance. Unlike text, A/V content can hardly be analyzed at a glance. Therefore, discovering new content, gauging (the relevance of search results, or browsing content, becomes difficult.
Also, A/V content analysis is a non-trivial problem. It often requires very complex and accurate speech recognition and language analysis technologies. Therefore, in the past, tools available for interacting with A/V content have been limited to simply re-creating the experience on previous generation devices, such as radio, television, and video cassette recorder (VCR) devices. Thus, the tools have generally included functions such as play, fast forward, reverse and stop. These tools are simply not very effective in giving the user the ability to discover, navigate, and consume very large amounts of available A/V content.
These types of limitations have led to the current approaches in making content available online. The content has been largely provided at one of two extremes. The first is to provide A/V content as a short (e.g., one minute) A/V clip which has relatively rich metadata. The second is to provide A/V content as a regular (e.g., 30-60 minute) show which offers little more than the traditional, linear A/V consumption experience.
Some current methodologies which attempt to address these problems include conventional keyword search methodologies. Searching summaries of A/V content, or other metadata relative to A/V content, for keywords partially addresses the issues of discoverability of the content. However, keyword searching of A/V content alone is not enough. It still leaves many obstacles. Evaluation of relevance of the A/V content that surfaces through a search is also non-trivial given the opacity and the linear nature of the A/V content, itself. That is, A/V content is not easily digestible at a glance in a visual snapshot, as is text, for instance, and it is also consumed linearly which makes it time consuming to sample.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.